Tails of Marin: A good day at the office for kittens

So often in our feral cat rescue, Marin Friends of Ferals, it feels like we're barely making a dent in controlling breeding. You think rabbits and mice are prolific reproducers? Well, unaltered felines are like polygamists or maybe the Duggar family from reality TV ("19 Kids and Counting"); their families just keep growing.

Unfortunately, feral cats can't control their mating and subsequent reproducing. No folks, this one's on us. As pet guardians, it's our responsibility to have them sterilized. But people don't spay and neuter pets for many reasons. Unfortunately, we see on a daily basis what shirking that responsibility produces, and it's often heartbreaking.

When an unaltered Tom cat hooks up with an unspayed feline, a litter of kittens is born. She might have litters three times a year, producing around 15 kittens — all from one fertile female.

When kittens go without human contact, they become unsocialized and therefore unadoptable. We have a couple months before they become feral, never to have the cushy life of a loved domestic adopted through the Marin Humane Society. So one of Marin Friends of Ferals goals is to rescue them in time.

That brings me to Ebony and Harmony. Normally, trapping kittens is easy, but these two took us days. We were stumped as to how they evaded the trap until we finally caught them on a hillside; both had small eye syndrome and were essentially blind. Our nonprofit raised funds for surgery but their eyesight was only minimally improved. They now had two strikes against them: black cats are often last to get adopted and they also remained special needs kittens.

We placed Ebony and Harmony on numerous adoption sites but after months with no nibbles, we contacted "Homer's Odyssey" best-selling author Gwen Cooper. She has a Facebook page dedicated to her late cat, Homer, who was also blind. Gwen allowed us to reach out to Homer's fans and within a few hours we had more than 500 messages.

In the end, fostering, showing the cats at adoption events and reaching out to numerous rescue groups finally paid off. We ultimately chose a family in L.A. to be the cats' guardians. Now for the hard part, how to get them to their new home.

We prepared to take the 18 hour round-trip drive when one of our volunteers offered her family plane (and her husband to fly it). They also volunteer with another animal rescue, Wings of Rescue, and happened to be flying south that weekend. Perfect timing.

While we chronicled the cats' departure on Facebook, texts, phone calls and emails flew back and forth among those who lent a hand in caring for Ebony and Harmony and even those who hadn't, but had formed an emotional attachment to their journey.

That night we received a photo from the cats' new family. Ebony and Harmony were curled up on their mom's lap, sound asleep. It was a happy ending for two sight-impaired cats that would have died on that hillside had we not been notified in time.

Marin Friends of Ferals, which regularly works with the Marin Humane Society in the humane care and management of feral community cats, can be reached at MarinFerals.org.